New Search for Centauri Planets Begins

by | Dec 2, 2009 | | 20 Comments

To the two ongoing hunts for planets around the Alpha Centauri stars we can now add a third. John Hearnshaw (University of Canterbury, Christchurch) reports in a recent post on Cosmic Diary that the university's Mt. John Observatory has begun a program to search for Earth-mass planets around Centauri A and B. Although the observatory is heavily invested in microlensing technologies (working with the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics collaboration), the new efforts will put radial velocity methods to work using the Hercules spectrograph. The program is a joint effort with Stuart Barnes at the Anglo-Australian Observatory and Mike Endl at the University of Texas (Austin). And as Hearnshaw notes, the problem is a formidable one, given that an Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone around Centauri A creates a 'wobble' of only 10 cm/s (slightly larger for the less massive Centauri B). Yet the observatory is banking on Hearnshaw's statement that 30,000 spectra of Centauri A or B...

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Of Starships and Myth

by | Dec 1, 2009 | | 41 Comments

Back in 1999, with NASA's Interstellar Probe Science and Technology Definition Team investigating the possibility of reaching another star, then administrator Dan Goldin exhorted the agency to push its limits. "We have to set goals so tough it hurts — that it drives technology — in semiconductors, materials, simulation, propulsion," he told reporters, and later that year he described a new kind of space vehicle, one that taps advances in genetic algorithms, neural nets and nanotechnology. Those were breathtaking days, if short-lived. We were in a new intellectual space, a long way from Apollo. Reconfiguring the Metaphor Is a reconfigurable probe the size of a Coke can, one that taps local materials to adapt to a remote star system, what we might call a 'starship'? Charles Stross asks this question in a recent essay, noting that the Pioneers, Voyagers and New Horizons we've sent on missions that will reach interstellar space are starships, but not in the popular sense. The...

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Charter

In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For many years this site coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation. It now serves as an independent forum for deep space news and ideas. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image courtesy of Marco Lorenzi).

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